This is a 3-hour online master class, November 7th, from 2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. EST., with Keisha-Gaye Anderson, author of Gathering the Waters and Circle Unbroken. Anderson has worked in television since the beginning of her career, with credits including New Morning (Hallmark Channel), The Married Bachelor, NOW With Bill Moyers, Flag Wars, and A&E Biography. She has performed as a spoken word artist at a number of venues, including Bowery Poetry Club, Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and The Knitting Factory. She is one of the founding poets of Poets for Ayiti, a collective of poets from diverse backgrounds committed to the power of poetry to transform and educate. The proceeds from their poetry collection For The Crowns of Your Heads has helped to rebuild Bibliotheque de Soleil, a library razed during the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Poems on the Road to Peace, The Mom Egg, Afrobeat Journal, Sometimes Rhythm Sometimes Blues, Small Axe Salon, the Killens Review of Arts and Letters, Caribbean in Transit Arts Journal, and others. She is the recipient of a 2010 fellowship from the North Country Institute for Writers of Color and a Callaloo Fellow (Brown University). She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband and two children.

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This is a 3-hour online master class, from 2:00 to 5:00 p.m. EST, with Roger Bonair Agard, a two-time National Poetry Slam Champion. Roger has appeared three times on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and on the MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour, and is the author of four poetry collections: Bury My Clothes (2013) which was nominated for the National Book Award, GULLY(2010), Tarnish and Masquerade (2007), and co-author of Burning Down the House: Selected Poems from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe National Poetry Slam Champions(2000). He has spent a decade working with the youth at Urban Word in New York City and the youth at Volume in Ann Arbor. He is the co-founder the LouderARTS Project in New York. Currently, Roger is writer-in-residence with Vision Into Art, Poet In Residence with Young Chicago Authors, and teaches poetry at the Cook County Temporary Juvenile Detention Center in Chicago, IL. Your seat in the virtual classroom includesfree entry into a poetry contest that will be judged by Roger. Find more on Rogerhere.

This is a 3-hour online master class, from 2:00 to 5:00 p.m. EST, withBro. Yao (Hoke S. Glover III), a poet and author from Lanham, MD. He is a scholar who studies metaphor, professor at Bowie State University, and founded and operated Karibu Books, one of the nation’s largest African American Book Store chains. Karibu operated for fifteen years and participated in the rise of streetlife literature in the African American book industry. His poetry has been published in Smartish Pace, African American Review, Obsidian III, Crab Orchard Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, New Purlieu Review in addition to other journals and anthologies. He is currently working on publishing his manuscript entitled Inheritance. His essays and books reviews have appeared in Tidal Basin Review and Black Issues Book Review. Your seat in the virtual classroom includes free entry into a poetry contestthat will be judged by Yao. Find more on Bro. Yaohere.

This is a 3-hour online master class, July 18th, from 2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. EST., with Thomas Sayers Ellis, co-founder of The Dark Room Collective (in Cambridge, Massachusetts). Thomas is the author of Take Three #1(1996), The Genuine Negro Hero(2001), Song On: A Chaplet of 6 Poems (2005), The Maverick Room (2005), which won the John C. Zacharis First Book Award, and of Skin, Inc.: Identity Repair Poems(2010), an ambitious argument in sound and image (lyric sequences, perform-a-forms, sonic/visual diagrams, and photographs) for an America whose identity is in need of repair. One poem, “Race Change Operation,” begins: “When I awake I will be white, the color of law.” Thomas lives in Brooklyn, NY, teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and Lesley University’s low-residency M.F.A Program, and is currently working on The Go-Go Book: People in the Pocket in Washington, D.C.